the picture of my heart
by newcitylights
Summary: "Besides," she adds leaning forward, her elbows coming up to rest against her knees, her hands clasped together. "I know how I felt that night, and all the nights beforehand. You can't put me in a timeline where the path doesn't end back with you." [a series of conversations between Lucy & Wyatt somewhere down the line]


_a/n: This has no plot, rather there were lines from conversations between Lucy & Wyatt that I couldn't get out of my head, so I strung them all together and this is the result. The historical event I imagine this taking place around is William Lloyd Garrison's first public anti-slavery speech, which is 100% irrelevant to the story but he's one of my favorite people in history so I'm giving him a shout out. Set in Lucy & Wyatt's original timeline, somewhere down the line. Not beta'ed, errors are mine and apologies for them. _

* * *

" _Should I draw you the picture of my heart it would be what I hope you would still love though it contained nothing new. The early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have obtained over it, leaves not the smallest space unoccupied."_

 **\- Abigail Adams to John Adams, December 23, 1782**

The bed is lumpy, hard, old, and the room is stifling in the heavy summer humidity, not the slightest movement of a breeze, the thick air threatening to smother them both at any moment. They are, by every measure, miserable.

It's July of 1829 and they're in a room above a tavern in Boston, Massachusetts. They went through the usual routine, how-do-you-dos, colloquial pleasantries befitting the time that she always takes the lead on; and then he gave the proprietor the same last name they always give, signing in as a Mister and Missus, because it's easier that way, and quite often the only way, though the more time passes, the more he says it, the less it feels like a lie.

So they're sweaty and the room's too small and the bed's too small and everything is just always so much smaller back here; and he wants to hate it, he _does_ hate it, except there's a way she looks right now, in a chair by the open window, stripped down to the last thin layer of white cotton, her face softly illuminated in the warm flicker of the candles that guard them against this black moonless night, and there's a glow, a calmness about her, lost in thought, staring at nothing, and he hates this except – maybe not. Not when he gets to see her like this.

She looks delicate, soft, all shadows and silhouettes, the picture of antebellum beauty. But he also sees the edge to her now, sees the less-than-genteel line of muscles down her arms, knows the rougher feel of her hands that have spared and punched, drawn blood, pulled a trigger. He's been there for that, seen the hardening of her form, smelled the gunpowder on her skin, watched her split and bleed, taught her how to hit and get hit as the intensity of the last few years has demanded. But all that seems like a whisper now, rough lines blurred and concealed by the darkness, masquerading in the silence.

"What?" she asks a bit dryly, catching him staring.

He shrugs a bit and says "nothing" like he always does, but she keeps his eye line, and so he adds "you look beautiful," and she rolls her eyes, turning to look back out the window, avoiding him, his eyes still trained on her. He decided a while ago to stop not telling her how he feels, to not hold back; and while she tends to demur, deflect, laugh a little bit, he knows she likes it by the smile that always tugs at her lips. Like the one he sees now.

"So this speech tomorrow is a big deal, huh?" he asks, even though they've already talked about this, he's already gotten the run down on this New England guy he had previously never heard of who will make a speech then write a newspaper and devote his life to ending slavery, but she seemed really jolted by this one, and he likes hearing her talk.

She nods. "Mmmhmm. Helps fuel a whole movement." She sounds drowsy, listless, her eyes falling closed a bit, and he thinks it's the heat, that it's dragging on them. It's getting to him, making him restless, the nervous energy of the mission, the fatigue, the sweat that beads along his hairline.

"Pretty soon," she says, her voice the only breeze in the room, "we might be doing this with Rufus again."

He's silent for a moment. _Rufus._ They're so close to figuring it out, figuring out how to go back, how to get him back, the finish line is right there, he can see it. _Rufus._ "Are you nervous about it?" he asks her, because it's a big deal, going back. Bigger than they talk about.

She shrugs slightly, shakes her head a bit. "A little. No more than normal." She waits a beat, smiles quickly, acquiescing. "Maybe a bit more than normal."

And the question that has been summersaulting through his brain is now pushing at his tongue till he can't avoid it any more. It comes out of him. "Do you worry about changing things, other things, when we go back for him?"

She blinks. Once. Twice. Then she speaks. "You mean changing us?"

Yes, that is what he means, changing them, altering their timeline, screwing up the journey that took them from two broken and shattered messes to here, now, this room, one bed, socks mixed up in the laundry back home. He nods. "Yes."

He sees her take a big breath in, shift in a little in her chair. "No." And her response surprises him in its brevity, its confidence; it doesn't match his own.

"You're not at all worried, about what showing up to our past selves might do, about what bringing Rufus back might do?"

"I think it'll be weird for everyone, I think it'll be strange but no, I'm not worried." She pauses, then raises an eyebrow. "Wyatt, we're doing the time traveling, we're protected from all the changes. Everything that happened to us will still have happened to us. You know this." And he does know this, of course he does, but they also thought they could never go back to where they already existed, so rules don't have much currency with him anymore, not when he has so much to lose.

"Besides," she adds leaning forward, her elbows coming up to rest against her knees, her hands clasped together. "I know how I felt the night Rufus died, and all the nights beforehand. You can't put me in a timeline where the path doesn't end back with you." And her smile is so soft and lovely that it nearly smothers him, and he feels so painfully undeserving of her but so grateful for the absolution she gives his weary, war-torn heart.

He watches her as she stands up, reaching for the unlit candle on the mantle. She lights it, walks over to him, placing it on the table next to the bed. She stops in front of him, runs her hand a bit through his hair, down his face. She looks curious, loving, happy. Her lips curl into a bit of a mischievous grin and then she adds, "I am, however, a little worried about having to spend time in that bunker again. Yuck."

He laughs.

* * *

"What are you thinking?" he asks her.

She's staring out the window at nothing, a dark, quiet street, and he's sitting on the bed across from her in this ramshackle little room. She turns to look at him. "Oh, nothing." She replies, caught a little off guard. The heat is exhausting her. It makes her feel slow, weighed down.

"Doesn't seem like nothing." He smirks a little bit. He's got her number. "I know that look."

"What look?" He sounds a little cocky, a little too sure of himself, and a part of her is itching to take him down a peg.

"That _look_. I can see the gears turning in your head, Professor. Might as well spill it."

She narrows her gaze a little bit, pressing her lips together, and she loves how well he knows her, how he always seems to know which direction to push her and when, but she also hates it a little, that she can never fool him. It makes her vulnerable.

She sighs a little, giving in, as she always does with him. "There was this power outage once, when I was probably fifteen? Sixteen?" He nods a bit, acknowledging her, but says nothing. "My parents had gone away overnight somewhere, I don't remember, and they left me in charge with my sister for the first time, she must have been about eight," she ticks off the years in her head, it feels like so long ago, like another lifetime, like another life all together. She continues. "They had been gone maybe three hours when the whole neighborhood went black."

The memory washes over her then, little details previously lost to time sprint through her mind all at once - rooting through drawers for flashlights, making sandwiches for dinner in the dark, the look on Amy's face as she tried not to show worry, tried to act grown up.

"What did you do?" he asks, bringing her back down from the cloud she was drifting away on, rooting her back to the present.

She smirks her response a little and answers dryly. "We made a fort. Obviously."

He laughs in a way that's so genuinely surprised, like that was the last thing he expected her to say, and it makes her giggle in response, both at the warmth of the memory and at him, so clearly delighted with her in a way that makes her dizzy. And so she continues, smiling through the story, about how they both were frustrated and Amy was cranky with boredom, so she collected all the blankets she could find and set her little sister to work, told her they would be like pioneers on the Oregon Trail, just with batteries and Coca-Cola; and when Fort Preston was complete they hunkered down inside, telling lame non-scary ghost stories and reading to each other till they both fell asleep, and that's how their parents found them in the morning, power restored, living room a mess.

"Anyway," she sighs. "For some reason tonight reminds me of that."

They're both quiet for a moment. She can feel his eyes on her. It makes her squirm a little in her seat until he speaks. "That's a nice story about you. About Amy."

"Yeah?" she says a little quietly, a little hopefully, though she's not sure what she's hoping for exactly. He's just looking at her now, he's been looking at her all night, been looking at her for years, and it makes her a little breathless sometimes, that this man looks at her like he does, sees her in this way, loves even the parts of her she doesn't like, the person he'll never know. She doesn't quite know what to do with it, where to put all her feelings.

He seems to want to say something else but hesitates, then finds his way. "You haven't mentioned her in a while."

She ticks her head up quickly, a little rattled. "I haven't?" she asks a tad incredulously but cautiously, going back over the preceding days and weeks in her mind, trying to pinpoint the last time her name left her lips. She comes up empty, and he shakes his head at her. And it's a strange, sad thing to realize, because she thinks about her all the time, the world is full of reminders of her, colors and songs and bright, sunny days that scream her name so loud in her mind its deafening and yet - he's right. But why?

He cuts through her thoughts with "I wonder…" then stops, as if catching himself. She raises an eyebrow at him, but he shakes his head with a "nah, stupid."

She doesn't let him off the hook. "Wyatt? What?"

He kinda rolls his eyes a bit at himself, letting out a chuckle, like he's a tad embarrassed. It makes her smile. "I was just wondering, you know, since sisterly approval is so important, I just wonder what she'd think about-" and then he gestures between them.

She laughs aloud and smiles. "About you!?" And she feels the smile take over her whole face as she hears him say "come on!" with a laugh, and she's up out of her chair, closing the small distance between them with purposeful strides and then she's standing next to the bed, next to him, and she leans down, takes his face into her hands and kisses him with a smile, one she feels mirrored against her lips, and then she breaks it, plopping herself down at the foot of the sad, pathetic little bed.

She's still laughing a bit as he says "that's not an answer," and she can't help it, it's so disgustingly sweet of him to wonder what her little sister would think, to wonder if this person he's never met would like him, to want to be liked by her. It fills her up to the brim, the open, longing way he loves her.

She sighs very loudly and over dramatically, then rolls her head to look at him, giving him a bit of a side eye once over, appraising him. "Honestly?" she asks, and he nods his head. "Honestly I think she'd be shocked."

"Shocked?" Not the answer he anticipated, she can tell.

"Yeah. I didn't exactly bring a lot of dates home."

"Lucy," he says in a way that's like he's calling her out on a lie, like he doesn't believe her. He always does that when she alludes to her less-than-exciting past, like he can't comprehend that men haven't been constantly throwing themselves at her feet.

"And definitely none like you."

His eyes widen almost comically and she giggles a bit in a way that is almost embarrassingly girlish, like some kind of 1940s starlet with too much champagne. "What does that mean!?" he asks with a dash of incredulity in his voice, but also genuine curiosity; and she laughs some more, a pretty little picture filling her mind of Wyatt caught in one of Amy's great big bear hugs, her sister's playful teasing, all of them together sharing Chinese food and beer, a little patchwork quilt of a family.

Her smile lingers for a bit then fades, the curtain of some sort of sadness falling across her heart, looking at him, thinking of Amy, of all the things she can't have and will never have because of time and circumstance and those who wish her harm; these two great loves of hers, the two names and faces that tumble off her lips and float through her mind first thing and the morning and right before sleep, these two congruent pieces of her heart that will never be stitched together, separated by the grand canyon of time. She sees his face start to fall with hers, her sudden shift in mood almost jarring.

"Hey," he says, reaching out to touch her. "I'm sorry." He thinks he's hurt her; he's got that concerned, broken look on his face, and so she shakes her head.

"No, no," she reassures him, crawling up to lay beside him. "I'm just –" she stops, searches for the words with both hands, grasping to explain the surge of feelings overtaking her. "I'm just sorry is all. That you won't get to know her. Get to know me that way, that part of me."

His eyes narrow, brow furrows a bit, and he looks down at her with heavy, dark eyes. "You sound like you've given up." And she thinks he sounds almost disappointed in her, like he didn't expect surrender, and it pains her a little, the look on his face.

But there is this gnawing feeling in her gut, this pounding of worry in her head, and it mixes and swirls together until this thing that feels like a confession rushes out of her like a dam that's broken, the words finally freed from the confines of her mind where they'd been rattling around for months, maybe years. "Would she even be the same?"

He answers without hesitation, almost on instinct. "Of course she would-" but she stops him, cuts him off, his well-meaning intentions and reassurances a useless panacea.

"No. No 'of course.' There is no of course. You know that." And it hangs in the air between them, the name that goes unspoken, the cyclone of grief and destruction brought on by blind faith and phrases like "of course" and the intoxicating blend of nostalgia and guilt, the fool's gold of second chances. Because she wouldn't be the same, would she, the Amy they brought back? Her memories, her experiences, they wouldn't match her own, she might have never built that blanket fort, never used that strawberry shampoo, and after all this time what would that mean? To have her back but still have lost her?

He runs his hands along her cheek, down her jaw, through the ends of her hair, not saying anything purposefully she knows, to give her the time to breathe in, find her footing, and she steadies herself, reaching to grasp his hand in hers. "What if," she starts and trails off, but he nods his encouragement, squeezes her hand. "What if she came back, but I didn't recognize her? What if my mother – " and her voice cracks a little, the weight of the possibility just a little too much.

"Oh, Lucy," he says like a balm, like honey in tea, warm and rich and soothing. And he pulls her to him, rolling onto his back, her face nestled into his neck, his heart a metronome against her, a comforting meter that roots her to reality, to him. And she's so thankful for him in that moment, for his friendship and his partnership and for filling in the words she cannot bear to say.

"You're right," he says, a low rumble in her ear. "She might be different, probably would be different, and your lives wouldn't match. But Lucy," She breathes in against him, big and heavy. He continues, "I know you. You can't give up on people. Not on me, not on Rufus, not on Amy."

She feels herself nod against him, feels his lips ghost across her shoulder, up her neck. And he's right, she knows he is, knows she still wants her sister back, even with the fears and the insecurities and the possibility of pain made abundantly clear these past few hard, heartbreaking years, because some people deserve to exist, to make choices; some people are worth the risk.

"Yeah," she says, her only response, but tinged with resignation, acceptance, and a tad bit of hope. She pulls back to look at him, fingers lightly moving across his jaw, and her lips twitch a bit into the semblance of a smile, attempting to convey what she hopes he understands.

He nods at her, smiles lightly back. "Yeah."

* * *

He wakes the next morning and it's the Fourth of July, America's 53rd birthday.

He finds her already awake, standing at the washbasin, taking a wet cloth to her face and neck. She looks over at him when she hears him stirring. She smiles and dunks the cloth back in, then puts on a straight face. "I forgot my toothbrush. Think they have any at the front desk?" He rolls his eyes and scoffs. "What!?" she responds to his lack of enthusiasm.

"Oh my god," he shakes his head in mock embarrassment, but his smile betrays him. "How long have you been waiting to use that?"

She laughs, light and breezy. "Honestly, I thought of it yesterday." He shakes his head at her because god, she's such a dork. But the playful lilt in her voice indicates that she's broken free from the malaise that overtook her last night, and for that he is thankful.

The heat hasn't let up though, still unrelenting, and she hands him the wash cloth as he gets up so he can take this antebellum version of a shower. "So," he says, looking out the window at the people milling on the streets. "What's the fourth of July like in 1829?"

"Oh, not that different, honestly. It's always kinda been synonymous with setting things on fire. Fewer people with American flag t-shirts though." He laughs a little to himself, thinking of the trouble he used to get into growing up, about the trouble he's sure some guys will get into today.

"Been to a lot of car races and fireworks shows on the fourth, but never an abolitionist speech."

"Well," she says a bit coyly, raising an eyebrow. "Aren't you glad you met me, then?" And she smiles at him in kind of a sing-song way, a way that always makes him a little wobbly, and then she's back to busying herself with her petticoats and corsets, oblivious to the effect she has on him.

Because he is glad. So glad. In a way he can't describe, in a way he wasn't prepared for. It's 1829 and he's watching her fuss with her hair and he can't decide which is more unbelievable - this job or her; and he thinks it has to be her, the way she hums into him when he kisses her, the way she told him she loved him last night right before she fell asleep. There's no science to explain that, no equations, just circumstance and chance and a mountains worth of trust.

He has a thought then. One that tapped him on the shoulder last night and it won't quite seem to leave him no matter how hard he tries.

"Hey Lucy," he says, and she hums an acknowledgement but doesn't look up. "Lucy," he says a little more forcefully, and this time she turns to look at him. And he's not sure why he's bringing this up now, not sure why this is the moment it sits on his tongue, except he feels like he's on the precipice of so much – saving Rufus, ending Rittehouse, getting out the ring that sits in his drawer back home. And thinking about Amy, about the parade of what ifs brought on by time travel, looking at her like this, in the slanted morning light of the nineteenth century, she just seems like the one good constant thing in pageant of loss and pain and regret.

"I don't think we should travel without each other again." He sees her take a big breath in, pausing a little, then she moves to sit on the side of the bed. And she looks at him for a moment as he stands perfectly still, the underlying meaning of his words hanging heavy in the air. Then she tics her head to the side, motioning for him to sit beside her.

"I think it's too risky," he says a bit hastily. "If one of us goes without the other and we come back – "

"Wyatt," she stops him. He's grateful. She puts her hand on his. "You're right. I agree. We'll tell Agent Christopher when we get back." He nods his understanding and she keeps her eyes on his, and he feels it between them, the implication of his words, the nightmare scenario, one that doesn't involve death but rather erasure, nonexistence, returning home to no home at all.

And he knows that she is right, what she said last night about the path leading to her, to them. Its felt that way for a while, that this, with her, is always where he was supposed to end up, that this was the sometimes rocky road he needed to walk, run, trip and fall on to get to her, the happy home of her smile. But those pathways, those sometimes flashing neon road signs that took him to her side, those don't exist if she drowns in a lake, or he is killed in an explosion, or she's never born at all. And so he has to protect her, protect _them_ , and this is the best way he knows how.

"You've been thinking about this for a while?" she asks, sounding like she knows the answer.

He nods a little, his voice low. "A bit, yeah."

She leans forward then, placing a kiss to his cheek, one hand against his jaw. It's quick but sweet, and before he knows it she's pulled back, her eyes trained on his. "Me too," she says, because of course she has, she knows better than anyone the randomness of timeline changes, how the past can be weaponized against the present by people who want to hurt them, the heartache and manipulation that can follow.

"Wouldn't want to step on a bug and erase you from existence or anything," she says, her voice that low kind of humorous, straight and dry. When he lets out a chuckle she follows, her straight face breaking, and she rolls her eyes a little, glad he gets her meaning, because those butterfly effect style worries seem almost quaint compared to the forces that they fight against now, the danger their feelings put them in, the way it makes them exploitable.

"God, we're quite the pair, aren't we?" he asks with a squeeze of her hand and a bit of a laugh. She shrugs a little innocently and smiles. "Maybe someday we'll have normal problems."

"Normal problems," she repeats almost wistfully, as if in a daydream. "What are those?" And honestly he's not quite sure, has a hard time imagining beyond the hazy smoke of the past few years to some sort of tranquil, gun fight free future; to a time where their issues are grocery lists and mortgage payments, maybe even carpool schedules and kids soccer games. It's fuzzy and far, he can't quite make it out, this normal life with normal problems, but he wants it, is hungry for it, for anything really in a future with her.

But right now it's still 1829 and a few other people are waiting for them down the street, a few more waiting 190 years down the line. He can hear the street noise increasing as the sun climbs higher in the sky, a reminder of their responsibilities beyond this room, beyond each other.

She seems to read his thoughts almost, her eyes moving to look up at the clock then over his shoulder out the window. "No normal problems today," he says, filling in her thoughts for her.

"Come on," she says, tugging him up with her as she stands, gesturing to her dress. "Help me get into this awful thing and let's get to work."

 _Fin._


End file.
